WAR’s 12 Days of Christmas – Day 11

ORvR
Here’s another stab at 1.4. The new ORvR mechanic was suppose to freshen up ORvR – split up the zerg, slow down the city, make keep sieges fun. Well, it didn’t. Can we say hugest backfire yet? When you asked for feedback on the forums regarding the new mechanic we gave it to you and we told you it was boring as dirt. Unfortunately, as is usually the case with the forums, a very select percent of the population posts on them. Even more unfortunate is that those who posted said how much they loved the changes, a very select few voiced discontent, so Mythic was mistakenly lead to believe that that majority of the population would like the changes made to the ORvR. Well time has told the story better than I can. ORvR in the post 1.4 universe is a monster, by several accounts. I shall list my discontents which many share and try to provide constructive solutions.

Siege Weapons : Ground
There are a few problems here but they all center around the lack of siege weapons. For the problems –

They can be carried on aerial mounts and thus placed in positions out of range of even range dps classes.

There are too few of them for the amount of players on – the amount available should be a ratio of players present in the zone.

Their damage still seems rather low.

You need a Warlock Engineer to repair one (apparently Dwarven Engineers fail here), and the cooldown on the repair is 3 minutes.

They aren’t re-deployable.

Waiting for a second ram blows.

Siege Weapons : Aerial
Well this one is pretty basic

They are on a fixed track that circles around the enemy keep. I can think of two solutions for this one. Solution A – Enable control of the mounts x and y axis movement but force them to ‘disband’ if the player leaves the RvR lake. Solution B – When interacting with a mount have the option of courses you would like to circle (the outer enemy keep, the inner enemy keep, YOUR inner keep, YOUR outer keep, battlefield objectives). Why does the stupid creature fly away from your keep when its under attack? You should have the option to patrol your own keep and defend it.

There are simply not enough. In the video we were lead to believe (well I was) that there would be tons of aerial bombers. I had images in my head of the skies above the Ironclad in that scenario of goblin zeppelins clashing with gyrocopters. Instead we have four turkeys and lions. Oh, and lines for people waiting for respawns.

There is tons of potential here for awesome aerial siege warfare. Prior to my Warhammer experience I was a fiend in the field of Battlefield 1942. That game monopolized on the concept of total warfare – you had infantry, tanks, ships, planes, bombers, submarines,etc. Now purely pulling aerial concepts from one game to the other this could happen in Warhammer too! Give us control of our aerial siege weapons but make the controls a little bulky, not as smooth as a plane. The result!

Gyrocopters/Wyverns – Double seater longer reload/higher damage aerial siege weapons with a pilot and bomber. More maneuverable but weak against Griffons and Manticores. Most effective versus units with high damage low area of effect.

Dwarven Airships/Goblin Zeppelins – Behemoths in the skies. You’re looking at a 6-man operating vessel with a pilot, three defensive anti-air gunners, and two bomb-bay crews. Most effective zerg buster, high yield explosives with high area of effect damage with CC.

There is so much potential for siege warfare within Warhammer, it’s just a matter of will.

Battlefield Objectives
These things are now obsolete. While the concept of gathering resources to upgrade your keep may have looked grand on paper, all it did was render the BOs useless to an offensive zerg once their keep hit 5 stars. Instead of splitting up the zerg, all this mechanic did was funnel the zerg into the keep (for both realms). Sure some people will always still gank but the BOs have been rendered obsolete.

Keeps
There is possibly nothing more boring than keeps in their current state. Let me sum up ORvR post 1.4 for you – 1) Sit at BOs until your keep hits 4 stars OR let someone else do that in another zone and then go to the zone once it has a 4star keep; 2) get to the outer door and stare at it go down for about 10 minutes 3)Wait 5 minutes for someone to get another ram (generally this involves much yelling in region about people taking griffons from the guy with the ram); 4)Set up a ram on the inner door and stare at it for 10 minutes; 5)/stare at the door as much as possible; 6) zerg-rush the flag and cap it; 7)Pull out a banner and wait for a minute. People have told me all the fun ways you can assault/defend a keep with postern pushes or rat ogre tossing but the truth is 9/10 keeps are stale as bread from Jesus’s time.

Why defend posterns? Killing the enemy only helps them with their objective – getting in the keep.

What do tanks do? Four can sit on the ram, maybe some can harass the enemy who is bored and sticking their heads out of the back postern. I guess you can try to get one of 4 siege weapons…

What do healers do? Spam heals!

What do melee dps do? Bob in and out of doors hoping to snatch a quick kill…

What do rdps do? Exchange volleys of fire over walls most of the time not killing anyone.

Defenders tend to turtle inside the keep with occasional offensive pushes (morale pushes). Range dps gets focused too fast to get on the walls. Instead both sides just /stare the door go down and once it goes down there is the brief fight for the keep. Brief because most of the time the victor is decided in the first minute or two. At least Mythic got one thing right – keep sieges are long, boring, drawn-out affairs whose success depends more on the stamina of the assailants than it does on the fortitude of the few defenders (because lets face it, if you outnumber the assailants, you wont be defending for long).

Worst of all, if you are the underdog and your realm loses its keep, you have NO way to bounce back. No ninja-ing a BO or anything. You failed, now go stand outside your warcamp with a renown banner and double aegis and 400% AAO and reap more renown than those who won (wtf thought up this???)

Solutions to ORvR? Ah well there are a few.

Make respawning be a sphere of influence matter. By this I mean: if you are within the sphere of the outer walls of a keep, you may respawn within the gatehouse; if you are within the sphere of the inner keep you may respawn there; if you are no where near anything then you go back to the warcamp. Naturally the flags for offense and defense will be in different locations. If I’m attacking the Garrison of Skulls and I die and respawn, why do I end up way in the Southern Garrison?

More siege weapons! Why are we still getting those stupid skulls of the fallen and ordnance? Well you can allow us to purchase our siege weapons once again but instead of these dropping off players they can be obtained by escorting a resource carrier (everyone flagged for RvR within 20ft of one gets 25 ordnance, you need 100 to buy a weapon).

Varied aerial bombers as I depicted above.

You don’t want dom timers? Ok. Well force the lock to require both keeps and all BOs. Give the BOs significance again.

Let us hit the stupid door.

Let us redeploy and repair our siege weapons. Or let the Engi/Magus repair them as well. At least then they’ll be useful classes.